Lit Life Shops: Reading Lamps That Turn Us On

Writers have always struggled against darkness. Dylan Thomas famously wrote for his ailing father, "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." During WWII, Daphne Hardy, a British sculptor close to novelist Arthur Koestler, translated his German anti-communist novel and gave it the title Darkness at Noon. Even gothic queen Anne Rice is reportedly afraid of the dark. And readers have always had their own troubles with a lack of light—even on those newfangled e-readers, whose e-ink formats don't support backlighting. So today we shop for the best reading lamps on the web and say—to crib from the most famous book of them all—let there be light!